LIFE ASSURANCE 



and diffuse leucoderma if the candidate is to work in the sun, but 

 it is not possible to give further details, which must be left to the 

 common sense of the examining officer. 



The invaliding, temporary or permanent, of natives from a service, 

 particularly if a pension or a gratuity is available, requires great 

 care, and the possibilities of malingering must be remembered. On 

 the other hand, the effects of such apparently harmless diseases as 

 diffuse leucoderma should be borne in mind, and injustice should, 

 if possible, be avoided. 



LIFE ASSURANCE. 



Tropical life assurance is in its infancy, and so far has been mostly 

 studied in regard to India. 



Insurance offices usually regard 33° north to 30° south latitude 

 as including the dangerous climates of the world. They usually 

 consider those lands which lie nearest to the Equator as the most 

 dangerous, because of the heat, the endemic diseases, the lack of 

 sanitation, and the imperfect food-supplies. 



But the advance of knowledge with regard to the prevention and 

 treatment of tropical diseases, and the dawn of tropical sanitation, 

 has reduced, and is reducing, the baneful effects of many of these 

 factors. For example, the West Coast of Africa used to have an 

 official mortality rate of 80 per thousand, and an official invaliding 

 rate of 95 per thousand, but these had been reduced to 21*7 and 

 76*3 per thousand as long ago as 1903, and to-day are probably 

 much less. 



It is true that the older type of official, medical and non-medical 

 alike, disliked spending money upon improved sanitation and upon 

 the prevention of disease ; but this type of official is slowly but surely 

 disappearing, and the danger to-day is that official inertia may 

 undo years of official toil. 



It is therefore necessary that a high standard of sanitation and 

 disease prevention should be set for the tropics, and that this should 

 be maintained; and if this is done, then many of the serious objections 

 to tropical life assurance may be removed or abated in the future, 

 and as this is done better assurance terms should be forthcoming. 



Very many tropical practitioners have had experience in the 

 selection and rejection of tropical candidates for life insurance, but, 

 unfortunately, there are but few records to be found based upon this 

 work. 



In 1897 later, Cantlie, writing with regard to this matter, 

 stated that although the person in the tropics was exposed to many 

 deadly diseases, he was not very liable to scarlet fever, rheumatism, 

 and pneumonia, and that, excluding malaria, his chief dangers were 

 diseases affecting his alimentary canal and abdominal organs, and 

 that alcohol was an even greater curse in the tropics than in tem- 

 perate climates. 



He states that the insurance companies deal with each case 

 individually, and he suggests that during the first seven years of 



